The Pregnant Widow (25 page)

Waking in his studio, and getting out of bed, and all the rest of it—this was no longer a Russian novel. It was an American novel. So, not much shorter, but with perceptible gains: a general increase in buoyancy, and far less stuff about everyone’s grandfathers.

The bathroom area answered to all Keith’s sanitary needs. But it had a flaw: two mirror-fronted cabinets faced each other over the washbasin.
He had to keep these cabinets firmly shut when he shaved. If he didn’t, he saw his bald patch receding into infinity.

• • •

A typical interlude of pleasure and profit with the girls. They played I Spy, and What Would You Rather. They played a card game called Go Fish. Then they counted the freckles on Chloe’s left arm (there were nine). She questioned him about his three favourite colours and his three least favourite colours. Isabel questioned him about his three favourite flavours of ice cream—and his three least favourite. Next, Chloe burped the alphabet, and Isabel told him about a swimming pool so deep that even the grown-ups had to wear floaties.

“When the boys are here,” said Isabel, “do you feel ashamed?”

“Ashamed? Why, because they’re so tall and handsome? No. I’m proud.”

And the two girls laughed like the yellow birds …

He slipped away to his shed and spent an hour staring down into the thatchy crater of the Heath. Venus rose. What was it, this other thing?

• • •

It was better now—in society.

There used to be the class system, and the race system, and the sex system. The three systems are gone or going. And now we have the age system.

Those between twenty-eight and thirty-five, ideally fresh, are the super-elite, the tsars and tsarinas; those between eighteen and twenty-eight, plus those between thirty-five and forty-five, are the boyars, the nobles; all the others under sixty comprise the bourgeoisie; everyone between sixty and seventy represents the proletariat, the hoi polloi; and those even older than that are the serfs and the wraiths of slaves.

Hoi polloi:
the many. And, oh, we will be many (he meant the generation less and less affectionately known as the Baby Boomers). And we will be hated too.
Governance, for at least a generation
, Keith read,
will be a matter of transferring wealth from the young to the old
. And they won’t like that, the young. They won’t like the
silver tsunami
, with the old hogging the social services and stinking up the clinics and the hospitals, like an inundation of monstrous immigrants. There will be age wars, and chronological cleansing …

Perhaps this possible future explains a further anomaly of the age system: it meets no dissent. The old don’t agitate or propagandise, they don’t even complain about it, not any more. They used to, but they’ve stopped. They don’t want to draw attention to themselves. They’re old. They’re in enough trouble as it is.

But we think it good, we think it meet, the age system, and profoundly and fluidly democratic. Contemporary reality is the taste in the mouths of the ideally fresh. As we lie dying, not many of us will have enjoyed the inestimable privilege of being born with white skin, blue blood, and a male member. Each and every one of us, though, at some point in our story, will have been young.

•  •  •

The pure cold opal pool, cupped in soft grasses. No boar or stag had ever lapped and slurped at it, no insects had skated on its surface. And here he came, the glassy boy, and stretched himself out and bent his head, and quenched his thirst with his eyes …

From the first instant, when love came as swift as light, the boy became his own torturer. His hands sank into the surface, to embrace and caress the essence within—but it vanished in tremors of disquietened water
.

Then it happened, but too late:
You are me. Now I see that … What I want, I am … Let death come quickly.
And when he moaned
, Alas,
she moaned it too—Echo, or the ghost of Echo. Or Echo’s echo
. Alas. Touch me, kiss me, touch me, kiss me, touch me.

Let death come quickly. This was his last wish. And it was granted
.

• • •

Silvia said, “You’re a loser, Mum. Not
you
, but the whole first wave. You missed your chance, and it won’t come again.”

“We went Napoleonic.”

“You went Napoleonic.”

According to Silvia, the sexual revolution, like the French (perhaps), diffused its seminal energies in expansion, without pausing to secure its
base. In her view, the first and possibly the only clause in the manifesto should have read as follows (and Keith could tell it was salient, because he feared it):
Fifty-fifty in the home
.

“Fifty-fifty. All the boring shite with the house and the kids. No hyphen. Fiftyfifty. But you didn’t nail that down. You spread your wings in the wrong way. You grabbed the wrong powers. Administration, decision-making. More shite. Some God-awful document comes in the mail, and Pop goes and stands beside you looking lost. And you
snatch
it from his hands. I’ve seen him … I know he’s struggling now, but even when he’s fully fit he never does a tenth of what you do.
And
you’re earning. And you don’t even scream at him. You just let him get away with it.”

“I’m not like you. It’s my background.”

“Yeah. So what’s your form of protest? Ten minutes of noisy washing-up. You’re a loser, Mum.”

Accustomed, by now, to being talked about as if he wasn’t in the room, Keith said, mildly, and (as usual) rather off the point, “Your mother’s very even-tempered. My second wife was slightly bipolar. Like Proserpina.
One moment Gloomy as hell’s king, but the next Bright as the sun’s mass, bursting from clouds.”

“Here he goes,” said Silvia.

“My
first
wife turned out to be unusually changeable—moment by moment. You know, there’s a subatomic particle that turns into the exact opposite of itself three trillion times a second. She wasn’t as changeable as that, but she was changeable.”

Both women sighed.

“The micro world is womanlike.
You
know what I mean. It’s not so proud of being rational. The macro world is womanlike too. You should be pleased. Vindicated. Reality is womanlike.”

“He’s slipping off to his shed.”

“It’s only the middle world that’s manlike.”

“But that’s the one we live in,” said Silvia.

• • •

Keith sat smoking. In it came, and out it went: the familiar blend of benzene, formaldehyde, and hydrogen cyanide. Amen once said that in Libya the cigarette is a unit of time. How far’s the village? Three cigarettes. How long will you be? One cigarette.

He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by the god called Time? It won’t be that convulsive, heart-bursting spell between twenty-eight and thirty-five. No. It’ll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three.

When he walked the grids of the A to Z, through the flowing metal of the city, he gratefully heeded the instructions daubed on the roadside crossings, LOOK LEFT, LOOK RIGHT. But now—and this happened when he was driving too—he kept suspecting that there was a third direction he should be wary of. There was a third direction that things might be coming from. Not right, not left—but aslant, athwart.

Soon came the waiting, then came the metamorphoses, then came
torquere
(“to twist”); but first came the turn.

W
hen he entered the tower bedroom, at half past two, Lily and Kenrik were lying together on the bared bottom sheet. Lily in her satin housecoat, Kenrik in shirt and jeans and gyms. A rhombus of moonlight bathed their bodies in its innocence; but their faces were lost in black shadow. Keith said,

“Are you awake? … I drove the Rolls.”

Lily unsleepily said, “Where was Tom Thumb?”

“In the back with the Dog. Doing God knows what.”

“Was that them screeching off? That was an hour ago.”

“I sat up thinking.”

“Mm, I bet you did. Now where will
you
lay your head? You can go next door and climb in with Junglebum for all I care.”

“What’s
he
doing here anyway?”

“Him? What’s he doing here? Well. He made love to me, you see. And it was heaven. Some men know how to make a woman feel beautiful. And then he put his clothes back on—because he wouldn’t want you to know. Would he. Then he fell asleep. Or maybe he’s just pretending.”

“I wish I could see your face. Kenrik? … Push him over. There’s a pillow on the rug. Push.”

Then Kenrik rolled. There was a soggy but nonetheless sickening thud, then silence.

Lily said, “By the way. Buggery is the beast with one back. Isn’t that right?”

He said, “I wish I could see your face.”

“But you don’t have to do it that way round.”

“I wish I could see your face.”

T
he two visitors were packed up and on their way by mid-afternoon, but nobody who saw it ever forgot it: Rita and Ruaa, in the same frame of vision—Ruaa and Rita, down by the pool.

Meanwhile, Kenrik and Keith lay on the lawn in their swimsuits. Their utterly hairless chests, their flat stomachs, their full brown thighs: not particularly well made, and not innocent, but indubitably young.

Kenrik leant up on an elbow. “It’s Eden here,” he said nauseously, and sank back with a quavering sigh. “… Jesus, those birds look a bit rough. The crows. Not the, not the gaily coloured coolies in the tree—Christ, they like a laugh, don’t they?”

“Look at them up there.” Keith meant the
magneti
, perforating the horizon.

“They’re cool too. No. The crows.”

The crows, their bitter, scavenging faces, their hoarse cries of hunger. And Keith, too, croaked out his question: the one about last night and Lily … He was no longer all aglitter with cunning; he had begun to suspect that there were certain people who were better at cunning than he was. Keith felt like a tyro physicist who, on his first day, initiates an irreversible chain reaction, and then just stands there and stares. Kenrik said,

“I don’t think anything happened. But I can’t remember. Again. It’s shocking, that. And
rude
. But there it is. I can’t remember.”

Yes. Keith’s scheme contained another obvious weakness: it had Kenrik in it. “I thought you’d sobered up.”

“Me too, but after all that fucking coffee I drank another barrel of wine and went back on the Scotch. Jesus. It’s a bit better now. When I opened my eyes, first thing, I hardly knew what I was. Hang on. Maybe it’ll all come back to me.”

“… Describe hangovers. I don’t think I’ve ever had one.”

Showing one of the fragments of a good (Protestant) education, Kenrik said, “They’re like … they’re like the Inquisition. Yeah. Exactly like. A hangover racks you for your sins. And when you confess, it racks you even more. And by the way, if you don’t think you’ve ever had one, then you haven’t ever had one.”

“Isn’t it the same with sex? If you don’t think you did, then you didn’t.”

“Ah but it’s a funny mix, sex and booze. You can wake up saying sorry you didn’t, when in fact you did … Okay. We talked on the terrace. Then we were up in the tower. I remember thinking how nice she was. I remember thinking how loyal she was—Lily.”

This wasn’t as informative as it sounded:
loyal
, for Kenrik, was a term of broad approval; various drinking clubs, snooker halls, and gambling dens were praised by him as
loyal
.

“Sorry, man. You can’t ask
her
, I suppose. Can’t check with Lily.”

“I can but she—”

Lily in her indigo bikini was coming across the lawn to where they lay, unusually light-footed, Keith thought, like a girl in an ad for something healthy or fragrant—Ryvita, say, or 4711. She knelt at Kenrik’s side and kissed him carefully on the mouth. They watched her walk on down the slope.

“Mm,
that
reminded me of something. Change the subject for a bit. Rita. Did you watch her dancing?”

“The whole club watched her dancing.” The sweating nightspot, the cleared floor, the circular crowd, the strobes, the mirrorballs, Rita’s tank top and Union Jack miniskirt. “The limbo.”

“The limbo.” Kenrik sank back.

“And Jesus. The last time round, that pole can’t have been more than nine inches off the ground.”

“See, that’s what she wants. Amazing, isn’t it. For her that’s the perfect state of affairs. Every pair of eyes in the whole place,” said Kenrik, “transfixed by her box.”

“Would we do that? If we could?”

“Maybe. If we could. I don’t see it somehow. Then what?”

“Then outside she said,
You drive, Keith, and I’ll pop in the back with Sebs.”

“Could you see anything?”

“No, I kept the mirror up. I didn’t dare look. But I listened.” Intense
silences, punctuated by movements of demented suddenness—instantaneous joltings, jerkings, snappings-to. “Sort of whiplash effects. From him. Every now and then.” Keith sank back again. “When I got out he clambered over the seat. And they tore off.”

Kenrik laughed, reluctantly; then unreluctantly. He said, “Whiplash. She’s sort of great, the Dog. I’m too young to be doing all that queer stuff. Too young and too queer.”

“What’s it like, all that queer stuff?”

“It’s terrifying really. Cool at the time. Rita’s right, you know. I don’t think I like it—now that girls like it. I liked it better when they didn’t. Or pretended not to. What’s the time? Can I start drinking yet? … That kiss reminded me of something. There was kissing.”

“And kissing was all?”

“Yeah. I think. You know, I’m ninety per cent certain I
wasn’t
a naughty boy last night. And I’ll tell you why.” He came up on an elbow. “See, for about a week I’ve been thinking … I’m going to make an announcement. I’m going to announce that I won’t be fucking anyone ever again.”